Letter to the Editor: Mixing the arts and sciences

Although there are people who like to imagine a divide between the “Arts” and the “Sciences,” as the author of this column pointed out, in my years at Cornell I personally have experienced quite the opposite. A friend of mine is a Biology major and Theater minor. I know of an art student dual-degreeing in Mechanical Engineering. I know countless artist/techies. I started out as a Fine Arts major, am now in Biology. The list goes on.

Of course, there are students at Cornell who are solely interested in all things technical, and others who don’t want to think about math for the rest of their life. But especially at a school as large and varied as Cornell, there are so many students who bridge the supposed gap in academic pursuits, and they do it well. The author states that “each college brings a particular strength, be it design, networking skills or mathematical aptitude” but that “these strengths exist in relative autonomy, isolated within colleges.” Despite many dual-degree programs, yes, the seven Cornell colleges are more or less “autonomous.” But the students in them are not. In that sense, it is up to the students themselves to collaborate, unify their differing strengths and also to realize that any individual person can have more than one academic aptitude or area of interest.

Related

Although I set out to complete many of the 161 things, it is perhaps the tasks that I did not deliberately accomplish that have provided me with the most memorable college anecdotes, and classic “Cornell” experiences. I will dispense some of those gems now:

#66 See the brain collection in Uris Hall The second day of classes my freshman year, I had a class in “Uris”.

Andrew Ross Sorkin ’99 returned to Cornell Wednesday to host a book signing and panel discussion on his bestselling book, Too Big to Fail, a behind-the-scenes, moment-by-moment account of how the financial crisis developed. After receiving a degree in communications at Cornell, Sorkin eventually became the chief mergers/acquisitions reporter and columnist for The New York Times as well as the editor of the Dealbook blog, a daily financial report on nytimes.com.